The FreeBSD Developers Summit (15-18 August) has now kicked off in Cambridge (UK). Subject of discussions, amongst others, are operating system virtualisation, access control and the FreeBSD 8.0 release.

This is an invitation only meeting for FreeBSD (core) developers, but you can check out the Dev Summit wik to see what’s going on behind the scenes or check Philip Paep”s blog

Our developer summit here in Cambridge started off rather well today. Robert decided that a brisk half hour walk from King’s to the computer lab was a good start of the day. I happen to agree.

Will keep you updated with any interesting stuff i find out, especially about FreeBSD 8.

soliciting the submission of proposals for work relating to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system. A budget of $80,000 was allocated for 2008 to fund multiple development projects. Proposals will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit and cost-effectiveness.

If you want to help improve FreeBSD and would like to receive funding to do so, be quick: the deadline is 15 August 2008.

Details and requirements of the proposals can be downloaded here. Alternatively, there’s also the BSD Fund should you want financial support while developing for BSD.

Personally I’ve always liked the new FreeBSD logo over the mascot and hence I’ve not used it very often here. What do you guys think, should I put Beastie somewhere on this blog to make it look and feel more BSD? What do you think?

Under FreeBSD the ifconfig utility is used to assign an address to a network interface and/or configure network interface parameters.

The ifconfig utility must be used at boot time to define the network address of each interface present on a machine; it may also be used at a later time to redefine an interface’s address or other operating parameters.

Greylisting is an important tool in the war against spam. Servers who connect to a mail server with an active greylisting are given a 450 recipent address rejected error the first time they try to connect and will not be allowed to successfully connect for a predefined time frame (normally a couple of minutes). A 450 SMTP error is not a permanent error and an RFC compliant mail server will try and resend the email again a bit later on. On the other hand the tools spammers tend to use do not adhere to standards and will not bother to retry sending the message again.

This post describes how to access any photos taken with the Apple iPhone 3G from FreeBSD. It’s not showing how to synchronise iPhone contacts, calendar, bookmarks bewteen a FreeBSD box and your iPhone (3G), but Henrik is working on that.